Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: FIYAH, Diabolical Plots, and Flash Fiction Online

Fiyah 7/23
Diabolical Plots 7/23
Flash Fiction Online 7/23

The theme for the July issue of Fiyah is ‘‘Car­nival,’’ celebration, costume, and commu­nity. Things that Salmik, the main character in Nkone Chaka’s novelette ‘‘Sentience’’, initially refuses to take much part in. They are a scien­tist – a famous one – who helped to stop the spread of a deadly fungal infection responsible for untold devastation across the galaxy. It’s a feat they wouldn’t have managed without the great sentient library planet that helped them with resources and research. The sentient li­brary planet that is now getting ready to end its own life, and take its collection with it into oblivion. Salmik’s anger at the library and its decision springs out of the messy web of guilt and shame they carry surrounding their own family, the mother they lost, and their decision not to have children of their own. Now, faced with the carnival the library planet is throwing to usher it out of life, Salmik has to decide what to do, and who and what to honor as they face mortality, grief, and an uncertain universe. Chaka’s prose is powerful and beautiful, with world building and character work to make for an unforgettable reading experience.

Diabolical Plots wraps up their July issue with Samara Auman’s ‘‘The Dryad and the Car­penter’’, which finds a dryad locked into life as a tree, mostly content to give shade and fruit to those around them. Until, at least, a family headed by a carpenter sets up home and shop underneath them, and the carpenter keeps eying them with greedy eyes. The piece explores what it means to be in danger, to be unappreciated, and to have that lack of care seep into your bark and settle deep in your heartwood. And yet Au­man does a great job showing the dryad being reminded of their potential and their power, seeing that shrinking from danger is no way to meet it, but that neither must violence be the answer. And in seeking and finding another way the story finds a magic and a meaning with roots too deep to be dug out.

I was expecting more of a comedy from a story with a title like ‘‘Dave the Terrible’’, and yet Brent Baldwin’s story in the July Flash Fiction Online tells a more serious and nearly tragic tale of a man who inherits a scepter of power from his mother. Except that the scepter doesn’t really make him more powerful. For all that it talks to and advises him, what it seems to do it cut him off from his friends, from anyone who could cut through the keen grief and paralyz­ing fear he has at living in a world without his mother. Baldwin plays with the line between reality and fantasy, between taking time to heal and avoiding the world entirely. Dave has only a toxic voice in his ear, but has to find his own way to peace and healing which makes for an emotionally resonating story.

Recommended Stories
‘‘Sentience’’, Nkone Chaka (Fiyah 7/23)

This review and more like it in the September 2023 issue of Locus.

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